In a rare public airing of artistic differences, the two leading singers in the Los Angeles Opera's costly and ambitious staging of Wagner's "Ring" cycle have harshly criticized the director, saying the production is artistically flawed and physically dangerous for performers. In separate interviews, British tenor John Treleaven, who plays the hero Siegfried, and American soprano Linda Watson, who plays Brunnhilde, said German director Achim Freyer's avant-garde staging — which features a steeply tilted stage, bulky costumes and oversized masks — interferes with their acting and singing and poses excruciating physical burdens.

Mark Swed's May 21 articles on Peter Hemmings and Los Angeles Opera provided well-merited coverage of a man and an institution that have changed the cultural landscape of Southern California. One aspect that Swed touched on but did not praise sufficiently is the company's commitment to developing young local artists. This is a mission Los Angeles Opera shares with the Opera Buffs Inc., which provides scholarships and performance opportunity to young singers in Southern California. Swed suggests that other companies have "stronger personalities" than Los Angeles Opera.

Flora Laney Thornton, a longtime Los Angeles philanthropist and patron of the arts who was the namesake of USC's School of Music, has died. She was 96. Thornton died Friday of pulmonary disease at her home in Holmby Hills, her family said. A Kansas native who arrived in Los Angeles in 1948 with her first husband, Litton Industries co-founder Charles B. "Tex" Thornton, she was a major donor to numerous Southern California institutions, from the Library Foundation of Los Angeles to the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The rising Southern California-bred soprano Angel Blue is having a smashing Vienna debut ? except for an ugly encounter with a racist cab driver outside a Starbucks in the Austrian capital. Blue, who has sung several roles for Los Angeles Opera, where she trained in its Domingo-Thornton Young Artist program, was on break from rehearsals for Benjamin Britten's "The Rape of Lucretia" and needed a ride back to the venerable Theater an der Wien opera house. She hopped in a white Mercedes cab, according to the Viennese weekly magazine News, only to hear the driver snarl, "I don't drive black women.

MUNICH, Germany - Wagner's "The Ring of Nibelung" is no picnic. The epic four-evening mythic drama is the macho challenge with which operas prove themselves. It practically did in Los Angeles Opera when the company finally got around to mounting this monumental if confrontational pillar of Western civilization in 2010. The "Ring" has been no picnic, that is until now. As audience members found their seats at the Bavarian State Opera's historic National Theater here last month for "Das Rheingold," the first opera in the cycle, some 100 exceptionally good-looking young people dressed in summer whites (it was snowing outside)

In his latest movie "To Rome With Love," Woody Allen plays Jerry, a retired music executive and former opera director who travels to Italy to meet his daughter's fiancé. Upon his arrival in the Eternal City, Jerry encounters his future son-in-law's father, an undertaker who happens to have a perfect operatic voice - but only when he's singing in the shower. The chance discovery precipitates a series of comic set pieces, and prompts Jerry to rediscover his passion for the operatic art form.

At one time, Los Angeles was Weimar on the Pacific: Numerous German-speaking émigrés put their stamp on the city to which they'd fled. What with directors such as Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, writers such as Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, and assorted film composers and actors — many of whom gathered to express their love of German high culture and their hatred of fascism — it seemed at times that the Southland's intellectual life...

Tara Glynn Colburn, major benefactor and founding board member of the Los Angeles Opera at its inception in 1986, has died at the age of 61. Colburn died Friday of cancer in Geneva, Los Angeles Opera officials said. As a part of her philanthropy, Colburn underwrote the recent production of "The Barber of Seville" at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and was a co-sponsor of the production of "Madama Butterfly" planned for next season.